He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.
(1) Love’s Widowhood and Other Poems. By Alfred Austin. (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) Poems and Translations. By W. J. Linton. (Nimmo.)
(3) Dante: a Dramatic Poem. By Héloïse Durant. (Kegan Paul.)
(4) Father O’Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics. By A. P. Graves. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)
(5) The Judgment of the City and Other Poems. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)
MR. SWINBURNE’S LAST VOLUME
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1889.)
Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry. Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on earth. Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden of Bothwell. Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject. His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to dominate him. Alliteration tyrannises over him. Mere sound often becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal.
Let us turn to the poem on the Armada: